With her eyes set on a turnover of £100 million for her Oka home furnishings
company, Viscountess Astor, Samantha Cameron's mother, is moving in on China

Embodying the kind of entrepreneurial, can-do spirit that her son-in-law David Cameron sees as the solution to Britain’s economic woes, Viscountess Astor is expanding her Oka home furnishings company into China.

“We’ve just signed a licence deal with a Honk Kong-based company called Li & Fung, and they are huge global Chinese traders,” discloses Samantha Cameron’s mother. “We’ve opened a showroom in Shanghai and companies from around the world can come to visit.”

Mandrake reported earlier this month how Annabel Astor, whose business is now valued at around £30 million with 13 stores, has set her heart on achieving a turnover of £100 million within four years.

A mother of five, aged 50, she set up the business with “a bit of money” loaned to her and her business partners Lucinda Waterhouse and Sue Jones by William Astor, her second husband, but it was still “bloody difficult” getting it off the ground.

“It was the dotcom boom, everyone was throwing money at the internet,” she recalls. “I went round friends and investors for nine months, with my business model based on mail order, and everyone told me I was out of my mind.”

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Still, using quality materials imported from the Far East, she sent out a mini-catalogue to 10,000 people – “or was it 100,000?” she wonders – and, after a couple of years, the business took off. It now employs hundreds of people.

“There’s no reason why a woman can’t start a whole new life at 50, 60, 70,” she says. And her first design rule? “There are no design rules,” she says, cheerfully.